Posted on 01/08/2013 10:59:00 AM PST by Kaslin
Forty-odd (exceedingly odd, I might add) years ago, who would have envisioned a national war against drugs? Nobody took drugs -- nobody you knew, nobody but jazz musicians and funny foreign folk. Then, after a while, it came to seem that everybody did. Drugs became a new front in the war on an old social culture that was taking hard licks aplenty in those days.
I still don't understand why people take drugs. Can't they just pour themselves a nice shot of bourbon? On the other hand, as Gary S. Becker and Kevin M. Murphy argue, in a lucid piece for the Wall Street Journal's Review section, prison populations have quintupled since 1980, in large degree thanks to laws meant to decrease drug usage by prohibiting it; 50,000 Mexicans may have died since 2006 in their country's war against traffickers, and addiction has probably increased.
Becker, a Nobel laureate in economics, and Murphy, a University of Chicago colleague, argue for putting decriminalization of drugs on the table for national consideration. The federal war on drugs, which commenced in 1971, was supposed to discourage use by punishing the sale and consumption of drugs. It hasn't worked quite that way.
"[T]he harder governments push the fight," the two argue, "the higher drug prices become to compensate the greater risks. That leads to larger profits for traffickers who avoid being punished." It can likewise lead "dealers to respond with higher levels of violence and corruption." In the meantime, Becker and Murphy point out, various states have decriminalized marijuana use or softened enforcement of existing prohibitions. Barely two months ago, voters in Colorado and Washington made their own jurisdictions hospitable to the friendly consumption of a joint.
The two economists say full decriminalization of drugs would, among other things, "lower drug prices, reduce the role of criminals in producing and selling drugs, improve many inner-city neighborhoods, [and] encourage more minority students in the U.S. to finish high school." To the Journal's question, "Have we lost the war on drugs?" 89.8 percent of readers replied, "Yes."
One isn't deeply surprised to hear it. National tides seem presently to be running in favor of abortion and gay marriage -- two more elements of the culture wars that began, contemporaneously, with the battle for the right to puff pot. Swimming against powerful tides is no politician's idea of a participatory sport. Conceivably, armed with practical (i.e., $$$$$$) reasons for decriminalizing drugs, advocates of such a policy course will prevail. We can then sit around wondering what all the fuss was about.
What it was about -- you had to have been there to remember now -- was the defense of cultural inhibitions. Sounds awful, doesn't it?
As the counterculture saw things, inhibitions -- voluntary, self-imposed restraints -- dammed up self-expression, self-realization. They dammed up a lot more than that, in truth: much of it in serious need of restraint and prevention.
The old pre-1960s culture assigned a higher role to the head than to the heart. Veneration of instincts risked the overthrow of social guardrails that inhibited bad, harmful and anti-social impulses. The drug culture that began in the '60s elevated to general popularity various practices, modes, devices, and so forth that moved instinct -- bad or good, who cared? -- to the top of the scale of values. There was a recklessness about the enterprise -- do whatever turns you on, man! -- incompatible with sober thought: which was fine with an era that had had it, frankly, with sober thought.
Drugs are very much a part of our time and culture, which is why the war on drugs looks more and more like a losing proposition. The point compellingly advanced by Becker and Murphy may win out over the next decade. If so, the drug gangs may disappear, the prisons disgorge tens of thousands. Will things in general be as good as they might have been had the culture walked a different path 40 years ago -- the path of civilized "inhibition"? Ah. We get down here to brass tacks.
Sure, we can start there if you want but it would be more effective to just decriminalize the whole thing. Yes, I said all of them. It was all legal at the beginning of the 20th century the US wasn’t a smoldering pyre overrun by drug crazed zombies. Drug addiction would flare up once a generation and quickly burn itself out because there weren’t a bunch of busybody drug warriors trying to save people from themselves at the barrel of a gun.
So yes, all of it. I want to see Walmart and Target competing to deliver the highest quality meth for the lowest cost. Why...? How many people were killed over control of the vodka trade in the US last year? How many were killed over control of the meth market? Why?
I’ll bet they tell you no such thing - prove me wrong and provide an exact quotation.
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And I’ll bet you’re a paid agitator from NORML. Prove me wrong and provide documentation from NORML.
Substitute NA beer for the real thing at the taps at any bar and see how long things remain "social".
People drink alcohol to get f'ed up. It's all a question of degrees.
Sure it does. No disagreement.
But do you think there are no pot smokers that don’t hold a majority of the same political positions that you do?
There are many ‘libertarians’ that do not consider themselves lockstep with conservatives...except the drug issue. And they are not the Feed it to everyone’ type.
Pot users come in all political denominations. That’s just reality.
My nomination for the most pathetically ignorant post of the day.
Picking what to believe based on what your supposed opposition believes is a stupid way to go through life. You cut yourself from large bodies of ideas formed by guys who think like you before different ideologies rearranged themselves. For instance, libs used to be imperialists and started wars, whereas conservatives, and I don’t mean just libertarians, argued against them just as we argue now against other forms of Big Government. The realignment took place when the New Left took over the Democrat party and hawkish libs became “neocons.” Now Newt Gingrich can accuse Ron Paul of attacking fellow Republicans from the left, but in my mind neoconservatives never became actual conservatives. They stood still while our party shifted to the left.
This is not to impugn the likes of Reagan, who went from New Deal Democrat to post-realignmemt conservative. His conversion was genuine and is well documented. Also, it’s not impossible for a real conservative to be a cold warrior and National Security State/military-industrial complex champion in his manner.
As for drugs, I think our side got distracted by the dirty hippies, and confused their funtime with their leftism. So that there would be no mote hippies, and purportedly to prevent the decent from civilization to aimless self-gratification we ossified into Law and Order types. This was a confusion, though, of our famous “social conservatism” and ethos of personal responsibility and our fusion of the proper sphere of government. It was good for people not to use drugs but bad for government, especially the national government, to assume responsibility for stopping it.
Forgotten was previous conservative opposition to previous anti-personal responsibility crusades like Prohibition. Lefties were too obviously opposed to the Drug War for us to join them, even if we didn’t favor it on our own, which we did. Too late to for you, apparently, to go back and admit the dirty hippies were right. Just like we may never admit the War on Terror was a waste. That’s mean our enemies were onto something, but that can’t be. They are always wrong! That’s why they’re our enemies!
No, they’re mostly always wrong, and they could have been right for the wrong reasons on the Drug War. We are not always right, anyway.
“If we restrict ourselves to the one shot of which he speaks, yes.”
There are laws against public drunkenness.
Allowing more drug users will be expensive. The taxes for legalization won’t begin to cover, especially with pot, the lazy masses that would arise and demand WIC/EBT payments quickly.
“According to the FBI, two out of three murder cases are cleared; in contrast, the number for drug sales is assuredly no more than two out of three-thousand. “
What is your point? That more people should be convicted of murder? That DAs do better with drug cases? That drug cases convictions are so high they must be bogus? That juries are more willing to convict for drug sales than for murder?
Legalizing drugs will succeed because more and more people realize it was all a sham to begin with. Nixon was never anything but a sham.
I don’t have to “hope.” I can see where the nation is going, and drugs will be legalized in my lifetime... because it is too expensive in bodies, money and liberty to do anything else.
BTW - find for me the authority granted to the federal government to wage a “war on drugs” in the US Constitution. I’ll save you some time: You can’t. There isn’t any such authority. Drug laws are a state issue, not a federal issue.
The moralizing pecksniffs who wanted to inflict prohibition upon the US population from the federal level realized this - and that’s why they passed the 18th Amendment.
If only to point out that it was a logical response to the pathetically ignorant "I’ll bet they tell you no such thing - prove me wrong and provide an exact quotation."
Yes, there are people of no judgment or sense with drug use. And the sad part is, they’ll mostly cost a lot of any they had by the use.
The drugs and hippie stuff wasn’t a coincidence. The mental changes went hand in hand. You do this, legalize, and you’re going to see the more users blue up. Guaranteed.
I don’t know much about opium and the Framers, but I do know that potable water was harder to find and they therefore drank an amount of booze to put me on a coma, probably. This was also around the tine of the Gin epidemic in England. Our forefathers were lousy drunks, whatever else they were.
What you’re omitting from your otherwise sage observation is that there is a cohort of the ‘conservative’ movement that consists of moralizing whinges, Bible-thumping pecksniffs and the like.
These were the people behind Prohibition - and they were the people behind the start of the “War on [some] Drugs” - eg, Bennett and his sermonizing ilk.
These people need to find a hobby or something, because after 100 years of their whinging about the “evils of [insert something you can put into your body here]”, I’ve well and truly had my fill of these morons.
But isn’t that the core of being a free people? The freedom to really screw your life up?
Because there is one alternative. Someone telling you by law you cant. And that is not compatable with the concept of being a free man.
When you reduce this to its core elements, that’s it. But with freedom comes responsibility whether the drugged out waste product wants it or not. And if his freedom to fry runs in to my freedom to be secure in my person/finances/whatever, he gets to pay the price.
But some here crave the nanny/police state solution. There is nothing conservative about that I can find in any conservative text I’ve ever read.
Riddle me this drug warriors, Will more gun laws stop gun crime? No? Then why do you feel drug laws will stop drug crime/problems?
That is a very real, related and direct question.
” Our forefathers were lousy drunks, whatever else they were.”
Your hatred of them is palpable.
Drugs affect the mind. They REDUCE freedom when used. A gun is an inanimate object that when used doesn’t affect the brain. It’s no more a tool than a hammer.
A drug’s only purpose is to mess up the brain. There’s no ‘defensive drug use’. There’s nothing to it but to get high. There’s no benefit possible. Sorry, you’re wrong on this.
And yet they managed to found America.
Odd that. But people do not wish to accept the truths of history. They willfully ignore them to push a mistaken agenda.
Liberals do that often and the irony does not escape me.
And you two fly off the handle. I guess you agree that liberal agendas fail. So you have a problem with "Legalizing pot is a liberal agenda."?
Naturally I can show you 10-20 democrats, labor unionists, and other leftists that support pro-dope. Can you show me one credible conservative today that is pro-dope?
I'll give you Tom Tancredo. Even though he's a has-been. But just one. One politician, one think-group, just anyone or anything that is right wing and pro-dope.
Take your time.
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